I've released my documentary film on the history of the right to arms, "In Search of the Second Amendment." It stars twelve professors of constitutional law, plus Steve Halbrook, David Kopel, Don Kates, and Clayton Cramer. You can order the DVD here. And here's the Wikipedia page on it. SUPREME COURT SPECIAL: additional orders only $10 each.

Balkanization goes to town on Chicago's brief

"In the city’s attempt to preserve its weapons ban, it proves too much, essentially urging the Supreme Court to find that protection of the Bill of Rights and other fundamental liberties against state infringement has no basis in constitutional text or history, and is instead achieved solely by judicial implication. To make matters worse, Chicago’s brief makes common cause with precedent that has been properly labeled by civil rights leaders as “among the most misdirected in the history of the Court” and celebrates a post-Civil War Court that looked the other way while Jim Crow perpetuated decades of discrimination and violent rights suppression."

"Chicago’s repeated deference to these decisions of the post-Civil War Court—beyond merely respecting them as precedent, the city’s brief calls them a “venerated” line of decisions—is disconcerting. As the NAACP points out, in the line of cases initiated by Slaughter-House, “the Court enunciated principles far broader than were necessary to decide the matters at hand, and it too readily struck down Congressional legislation designed to combat discrimination against African Americans after the Civil War, including both the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror and the establishment of a reconfigured caste system in the form of the Black Codes and Jim Crow.”"

But suggesting that the 14th Amendment was not intended to protect fundamental substantive rights — for example, under the city’s reading of the text and history of the Amendment, states and localities could infringe free speech or free exercise rights so long as they infringed everyone’s rights equally — would seem to undermine the city’s credibility, not help its cause. And those who might otherwise want to support Chicago’s gun control laws should think twice about embracing a particular argument that denies the textual and historical bases for substantive rights protection in the states and joins with post-Civil War decisions whose fatal flaws are illuminated by the light of history and scholarship.